“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election,” said Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO. “Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources.”

With Kushner on board, the Trump campaign “delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning,” according to Forbes.

It helped that he knew the right people.

Those included the co-investors in Cadre, an online marketplace for real-estate deals that Kushner helped launch: Thiel, Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Kushner’s own younger brother, Josh, a venture capitalist.

“I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff. They gave me their subcontractors,” Kushner explained.

“I called somebody who works for one of the technology companies that I work with and I had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook micro-targeting.”

Following his efforts, the Trump campaign went from selling $8,000 worth of “Make America Great Again” hats a day to $80,000.

That generated revenue, expanded the visibility of Trump’s message and proved that the strategy worked.